American Stories

Album review

This album of clarinet quintets earned a Grammy Award nomination in 2023 for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and indeed, the performances by clarinetist Anthony McGill and the Pacifica Quartet are excellent, with clear textures and plenty of attention to the small programmatic details in all four of these works. However, the music itself is equally attractive. These are all contemporary pieces, but they revive the spirit of Romantic program music, and they rise to great heights of evocativeness. Actually, the level of specificity increases as the program proceeds through Richard Danielpour's Four Angels, based on the white terrorist murders of four girls in a church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963; the Quintet for clarinet and string quartet of James Lee III, which refers to historical events and also to music by Nathaniel Dett and William Dawson; and the High Sierra Sonata of Ben Shirley, suggested by the mercurial weather of those mountains. Perhaps the most remarkable is Valerie Coleman's Shotgun Houses, with the title referring to the neighborhood in which Muhammad Ali grew up in west Louisville. The three movements are based in various episodes of his life, with the finale being an almost blow-by-blow depiction of Ali's fight against European champion Zbigniew Pietrzykowski in Rome in 1960. Everything on the album is beautifully detailed, fully accessible, and impressively performed. Another strong contemporary release from the Cedille label.

© James Manheim /TiVo